Conventional web content filtering allows a parent or administrator to filter web content based on an attempt to match the content itself to defined categories. Particular web pages are determined to fall within given categories based on the presence of certain predetermined words or phrases thereon. For example, a page containing information about guns may be categorized as belonging to a “weapons” category, whereas another containing sexually related material would be categorized as “pornography.”
Conventional content filtering solutions typically categorize web pages using a combination of automatic and manual processes. A software process called a web crawler feeds pages to a fact-based analysis engine, which assigns the pages to predefined categories by searching for words and phrases associated with those categories. Pages which are ambiguous may by flagged for a manual review, in which case a human being reviews and manually categorizes them.
Conventional web content filtering is lacking in several ways. The process of categorizing web content based on the occurrence of given words or phrases is error prone. For example, merely looking for predefined phrases/words could lead to a web page on breast self-exams being categorized as “pornography.” The manual review of web pages by a person is time consuming and expensive, and can lead to the same types of misclassifications because the person is still categorizing web pages into predetermined categories based on the occurrence of specific words or phrases. This process is also ineffective in rating dynamic, user modified content, such as blogs, social networking pages and other user postings, which change quickly and can have a different focus or tone from moment to moment.
Furthermore, categorizing web pages solely based on the occurrence of predefined content is fundamentally flawed. For example, parents often wish to shield their children from viewing certain types of material, but to varying degrees based on age. The policy a parent wants to enforce is often more subtle than a simple yes or no for each of a set of predetermined categories. For example, a parent may wish to block all sexually related content from their eight year old, block all but informational content from their 13 year old, and allow all but violent or extreme content for their 17 year old. Other examples include: allowing a child to view hunting catalogs but not violent weapons sites, allowing a child to access news sites that describe violence but not gore sites, allowing a child to read historical accounts of World War Two that discusses Nazis but not hate sites, and allowing a child to access informational or medical sites concerning anorexia but not sites that promotes it. The simple granting or blocking of access based on whether a given page is determined to belong to a predetermined category does not allow these types of distinctions.
It would be desirable to address these issues.